If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.

My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.

Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.

Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!

We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.

I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.

I feel sorry for confetti. Its useful life lasts about two seconds. And it can never be used again.

Africans didn't want saving, thank you very much, least of all not by me.

If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you're not out there, you'll only hear about it.

Language is what stops the heart exploding.

I wouldn't say I was grumpy. It's more pathological - I have seismic tantrums. I get red in the face and cry at least three times a week, and I have to lie down and have a nap afterwards.

God's desire is that we excel.

Everything should be at once surprising and inevitable.

I have spent my whole life educating myself.

Love's blindness consists oftener in seeing what is not there than in seeing what is.